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JUSTIN CROSS | An Artistic Project We Need to Back… Immediately

I have a number of friends God has jammed to the brim with gifts for bringing theology, pain, beauty, darkness, and joy into musical expression. When we deal with the most poignant realities of life, we must regularly appeal to more artistic media forms to honor the complexity and depth. We need songs and poems. We need singer-songwriters.

Justin Cross is one of these freakishly gifted friends of mine. And he needs some help. A good many singer-songwriters live in this odd tension of being gifted for song, yet unable to bring their artistic labors to birth without the practical necessities of expensive studio time and costly technical equipment. Justin has an album and it needs to make an appearance. We need songs that are honest about sorrow and pain yet pulsing with hopefulness, lunging lyrically toward some distant light, however faint.

His project is “Hope Where It Lies.” As of today he is $875 shy of his budgeted target of $3000 to see this album come to life. There are nine days left of the campaign.

I am writing this post to ask you to join me in helping him. It is a plea I can make with absolute confidence in the quality of work Justin is putting out.

“Hope Where It Lies” is a concept album. It tells the story of a man from youth to adulthood to the deathbed (and beyond?). The songs range from personal and reflective confessionals to rollicking and rowdy protest songs. The story is simple: It’s about a life from beginning to end. It’s about brokenness, heartache, joy, redemption, and (of course) hope.

I should also say that Justin’s work in this album is really special to me personally because he was at my side wrestling with issues of cynicism and disillusionment while I was writing Faith Without Illusions and developing the main idea driving this blog, the idea of “Hopeful Realism.”

This album comprises songs for the hopeful realist, my friends.

If you like what you see at the indiegogo site, check out his page at Bandcamp. Among the offerings, there is an Advent album ready to download….